BETWEEN THE HEATHER AND THE
NORTH SEA
Bold English Headlands Once Sheltered Sea Robbers, Later
Were Ports of Wooden Ships, Centers of the Jet
and Alum Trades, To-day Are Havens
of Adventurous Fishing Fleets
BY LEO WALMSLEY
With Illustrationsfrom Photographs by the Author
M Y TITLE is not original. It was
suggested by a novel of Mary
Linskill, a celebrated Whitby
writer, published in 1884. The district I
shall describe is that same narrow strip of
northeast Yorkshire which the writer of
Victorian romance found so inspiring.
This district includes and runs north
and south of the ancient port of Whitby,
between the wild, heather-clad moors and
the North Sea's edge. It extends north
ward to Skinningrove, where grim blast
furnaces and gigantic steel mills mark the
outposts of the Tees industrial area. It
reaches southward to the massive promon
tory of Ravenscar, one-time haunt of the
Danish sea robbers, where the moor edge
starts to sweep inland, and there is that
subtle change of geographical feature
which denotes a different neighborhood.
Nowhere in England is there a district
of greater beauty, of greater geographical
and geological interest, or one more teem
ing with romance than this. At Whitby
lived the saintly Lady Hilda. There the
humble cowherd, Caedmon, was inspired to
compose the first English sacred song. On
the summit of the cliff that overlooks the
harbor from which Capt. James Cook
sailed on lhis hazardous voyages of discov
ery the gaunt ruins of what undoubtedly
was one of the loveliest of English abbeys
still offers a sure landmark to the seaman.
SECRET CELLARS BETOKEN ERA OF
SMUGGLING
Five miles southeast of Whitby is the
little fishing town of Robin Hood's Bay.
There, if legend is to be trusted, that
audacious outlaw, Robert of Huntingdon,
lived in the Abbot of Whitby's deer for
est, whose stone-wall boundaries stand to
this day. It was he who waylaid and
plundered the rich ecclesiastical convoys
traveling the rude pack road between the
old seaport and the holy city of York.
Robin Hood's Bay town, an amazing
mass of red-roofed cottages clustered on
each side of a steep ravine at the leeward
corner of a superb bay, was renowned as a
smuggler's stronghold in the 17th and I8th
centuries. Staithes and Runswick, to the
north of Whitby, enjoyed a reputation no
less honorable. There is scarcely a cottage
in each of these villages-or along the en
tire coast, for that matter-which has not
its secret closet or cellar where once the
bales of silk or kegs of schnapps were hid
den from the prying excisemen.
To-day the people of the coast are for
the most part tall, fair-haired, and blue
eyed. They are the pure descendants of
those Danish and other Scandinavian sea
warriors who, first as marauders and
finally as colonists, in the dawn of Eng
land's history, crossed the wild wastes of
the North Sea in their open boats (see illus
tration, page 205). They speak a dialect
which, in its vocabulary and idiom, has
much in common with that of certain dis
tricts of modern Scandinavia, especially of
Denmark. Their folklore, superstitions,
and customs also are largely Scandinavian.
The sea is in their blood. To the major
ity of them it is still a profession.
The geological formation of this region
consists chiefly of soft blue shales, very
rich in iron, that were originally deposited
at the bottom of a tropical or subtropical
sea, where animal life was extraordinarily
diversified and abundant.
In this sea lived ferocious, crocodile
like reptiles whose fossilized remains are
frequently found intact in the cliffs and